Petropoulos' book is closer to the deeper essence of the rebetiko culture, without attempting at all to "analyze" it and even more to idealize it.

It took me a while to understand where this superiority of Petropoulos comes from. Today I believe I know the answer. But I am not sure in which language I should express it. Because Petropoulos' book is one of those rare cases where empirical research and poetry meet, traversing a terra nova almost inaccessible to conventional language.

Petropoulos was the first to make rebetiko an object of research. Like all pioneers, he did not merely discover a new world, swimming against the tide, but also sensed it, almost intuitively, in all its dimensions. He suspected all its secret paths, all its hidden corners, all its mysteries.

And precisely because he saw it in its entirety, he described it more allusively than analytically. Those who followed moved in one direction or another that he indicated or hinted at. But most lost sight of the whole. And thus they lost the essence of what they were researching.

Petropoulos is one of the few remaining masters of the essay. Very few Greeks write such beautiful Greek, so that their speech balances marvelously between precision and elegance, between scientific rigor and aesthetics.

Very few know how to present their subject in such a way that they draw their readers into a captivating journey, where the most familiar forms, the most everyday objects turn out to be repositories of unknown and exquisite treasures.

Petropoulos' book is part of the rebetiko culture. It is itself a historical document.

Demosthenes Koutovik ELEFTHEROTIPIA, 14-3-1990